Friday, November 21, 2003

New feature: Previous/Next links through archive. 

Lisa Williams talks about the software I demoed last night.  

Chris Lydon interviews Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi. Highly recommended that other campaigns at all levels listen to this interview. There's no reason you can't do the same. It's a fundamentally different philosophy for a campaign, and whether you agree with Dean's policies or not, whether he gets nominated or elected, we all have a stake in its success. After listening to the interview I believe Trippi would agree with that. 

National Weather Service alerts are available in RSS 2.0. Bing! 

I subscribed to the feed for Massachusetts. "There are no active watches, warnings or advisories." 

I just did a total brain transplant on my CMS. Let's see if this shows up. It did. Now I'll route this to a category, Fun/Neat Net Tricks. And this post showed up. Amazing. I can't believe it. Now let's see if I can edit the cats. Yup. Now the directory shell. Try adding a movie. That worked too. Let's see if pictures work. Yes ma'am. Here's Joe Trippi's Diet Pepsi. Now I'm going to have to disappear for a bit to add code that does static rendering of the the HTML and RSS versions. This stuff isn't on www.scripting.com yet. Now it is. Have to hook up the static RSS feed. Testing. 1-2-3. All is good. 

David Galbraith: "Things that aren't really search engines, like Amazon and Ebay, or the classification of species for that matter, would be useless without some kind of ontology." 

Actually I agree with Galbraith on this one, now that I've read the rebuttals to Shirky's piece. I agree with Shirky about how shrill and offensive the priests of the Semantic Web are, but I believe in taxonomy, which I guess is the same thing as ontology. And I know it works for a different reason than Galbraith -- I wrote outliners in the 80s and 90s and am building on them now, and they are nothing more than personal ontology editors. So there. They key is to take the rigidness out of it, and to throw out the people who think everything anyone else invents is junk. Hierarchies are good, if you don't expect too much of them. 

Scott Rosenberg: "What 'some are now attacking the president for,' of course, is not for 'attacking the terrorists' but for his foolhardy and foundering invasion of Iraq." 

I was trawling various referrer logs, and came across Richard Stallman's personal site, where he points to something I wrote. We've certainly gotten into a few heated discussions, but when it comes to keeping the Internet free of ownership by media companies, we're on the same side. I like. 

Simply Live Anywhere: "You need the power of a heavy jetliner to get an idea off the ground." 

It took me a while to figure out who Moose is. It's Jessica the Librarian, a Thursday night regular. Moose? 

Press release: "Weblog software leader Six Apart and NIFTY, one of Japan's leading ISPs, have announced a licensing agreement to provide Six Apart's popular TypePad weblogging service to over five million NIFTY subscribers in Japan." 

My four year old Sony Vaio is too old, the CPU is slow, the OS is out of date, and it's thrashing awfully, and I feel like treating myself to something new. Dave Jacobs says I should get a ThinkPad, and after talking with a couple of other people I decided to buy one since I can get a huge discount through Harvard. I called their order line, and in ten minutes we had zeroed in on the unit. Fast, lots of memory, great warranty. The guy puts me on hold to confirm they have it in stock, and never comes back. Twenty minutes later the phone system offers me five choices that make no sense. I hit Operator. The guy has no idea, and unlike the first guy, who was pure IBM (competent) the second guy is like jello. Can't get him to help me. So I say goodbye and call back, and wait another twenty minutes. This would be a perfect IBM commercial. BTW, lots of the glitches are things that could be fixed if they hired a user to tell them how silly, repetitive and even contradictory the phone messages are. And the music they play, pretty sexy stuff. At IBM? The world has gone crazy. It's official. 

Andrew's looking for a new laptop too. 

Friendster user on Friendster: "...the fantasy that we are all rock stars, that everyone's ass looks great in leather, that everyone is sexy." 

Today's song: "I want the world to change for me!" 

A Seattle reporter who covers Microsoft has an alternate view of ApacheCon, including Chris Pirillo's keynote. On the other hand, Doc Searls says it reminded him of BloggerCon.